The context is not exactly clear from the extract, so one might think the (about) 25,000$ per year most shareware authors were making was barely sufficient to make a living; but if we assume these are 1988 dollars, it amounts to about 50,000$ in today's dollars, which ain't bad.

Masters of Doom is the story of John Carmack and John Romero creating the seminal games Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. It's an amazing work on so many levels – but primarily because of the exhaustive research the author undertook to tell this story. To re-create the story of the Two ...

> > with SO, you deconstructed the online forum/BBS, and now you are setting out to reconstruct them
> Not at all -- Q&A is a small subset of what communities do. Not all communities can work in a fact and science based Q&A format, but that's what the SE engine is by *far* best at.
Now watch as I rant for dozens of lines justifying why my analogy was appropriate:
(just kidding, it's not worth getting upset over :)

Occasionally, startups will ask me for advice. That's a shame, because I am a terrible person to ask for advice. The conversation usually goes something like this: We'd love to get your expert advice on our thing. I probably don't use your thing. Even if I tried your thing out and I gave you ...

Nothing wrong with making a better TIE Fighter, I mean you could end up creating the TIE Advanced (my favorite starfighter), but I rather think of it that way: with SO, you deconstructed the online forum/BBS, and now you are setting out to reconstruct them. Anyway, I wish you best of luck.
Heh, we were just questioning (for the umpteenth time) why Community Server was still being used on tdwtf, and I hoped at the start of this post that you would come and save us (Alex Papadimoulis insists on a .NET solution and that's what you traditionally use, would have been nice timing, right…), when I saw the Ruby/Ember stuff. Okayyyy… At least forums (contrary to, say, a CMS) are something you can and typically do put on a separate subdomain so it is not too far-fetched to sign up for separate hosting specifically for the forum, but still I wonder if that won't impede adoption.
I don't want to comment on the open-source claim/licensing/CLA stuff; just be careful, you're risking bringing back the Mark Pilgrim onto the Internet to again trot out the Movable Type licensing vs Wordpress thing.

Occasionally, startups will ask me for advice. That's a shame, because I am a terrible person to ask for advice. The conversation usually goes something like this: We'd love to get your expert advice on our thing. I probably don't use your thing. Even if I tried your thing out and I gave you ...

I'm a huge Apple fan, and an iOS developer, but you won't me see disagree with the base sentiment. The worst, I think, is that Apple, in Keynotes and investor calls, boasts of how much they are "paying" developers. While it is money transiting through their bank accounts (when you buy an app Apple collects the money, then forwards it minus their cut to the developer), using "paying" here is an outrageous claim if I've ever seen one. Developers earned that money from their customers. Apple is merely an intermediary in this transaction.
The matter of Apple adding a feature that partially or totally obsoletes a third-party app is... complicated. Let's just say that if Apple couldn't do so, the missing features would soon become omissions, and buying out the third-party app is not always appropriate. The computing landscape evolves (be it the need for concurrency in this multi-core era, the new user interface paradigms, network and broadband availability which makes browser's offline modes look stupid nowadays, user expectations wrt to media sync, to integration with well-known services like Google or Flickr, to app workflow) and applications have to evolve with them; these evolutions include the changing scope of what an operating encompasses: what the browser was yesterday (remember when IE got included for free in Windows? Good times), reading list is today. However, the one-two punch of "I'm going to allow users to save synced bookmarks to read later. You don't mind?" then "hey I'm going to remove your offline content now" sure is worrying. Many more are affected by the latter in fact.

I enjoy my iPhone tremendously; I think it's the most important product Apple has ever created and one they were born to make. As a consumer who has waited far too long for the phone industry to get the swift kick in the ass it so richly deserved, I'm entirely on Apple's side here. But as a so...